In recent times, the concept of virtue has regained a prominent role in public discourse and in academic ethics as well. However, it has not yet been dealt with very much in contemporary political theory and legal philosophy. This paper aims at clarifying the relationships between law and moral virtues in two respects. First of all, there is the question as to whether and to what extent the law...

Virtues, or habituated excellences of character, have been understood as having important roles in political regimes since the very beginnings of Western political thought. Across remarkable variation in theorists’ contexts and perspectives, the virtues are considered central to the flourishing of regimes beyond otherwise abstract norms and formal institutions. In Greek thought, for example, et...

Principlism, a most prominent approach in bioethics, has been criticized for lacking an underlying moral theory. We propose that the four principles of principlism can be related to the four traditional cardinal virtues. These virtues appear prominently in Plato's Republic and in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. We show how this connection can be made. In this way principlism has its own compell...